First came fracking under Salt Fork State Park. Now the federal government moves to open up thousands of acres in Ohio's only national forest.
The plan involves 2,800 acres in Wayne National Forest.
Ohioans complain about rising property taxes – but what does efforts to cut or eliminate them look like.
Two proposed bills would require K-12 students to learn about food literacy.
And it turns out the controversial Flock automated license plate cameras are used by several state agencies.
We'll discuss all this and more on our Weekly Reporter Roundtable show.
Guests:
- Jo Ingles, senior reporter, Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau
- Jake Zuckerman, reporter, Signal Ohio
- Laura Hancock, politics and policy reporter, Cleveland.com
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to the All Sides Reporter Roundtable, an hour where we catch up on the political news of last week and preview the week ahead. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Joining me on the Roundtable we have Joe Ingles, senior reporter for the Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau. Welcome back, Jo.
Jo Ingles: Great to be here.
Juravich: And Jake Zuckerman, reporter for Signal Ohio. Welcome back, Jake.
Jake Zuckerman: Thanks for having me on.
Juravich: And in a few minutes, we'll have Laura Hancock joining us. She's politics and policy reporter for cleveland.com. We're gonna start by talking about some fracking news. First, the state okayed fracking under Salt Fork State Park. Now, the federal government is moving to open up thousands of acres in Ohio's only national forest. Jake, you wrote about this. This is Wayne National Forest. It's in Southeast Ohio. Is this a done deal? Are we fracking in Wayne National forest?
Zuckerman: It's not a done deal. The Bureau of Land Management announced the sale of the lease parcels. That's going to be in September. So there's still a 30 day protest period. The Bureau Of Land Management also has to actually issue the permits to I think there's a drilling permit and then an operational permit. But I think it stands to reason that with their acceptance of the least sale. They've done the blocking and tackling, they've done environmental analyzes, they've the machinations of a bureaucracy. So, I mean, I talked to an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity who has been litigating against this plan and she says it's just kinda unrealistic to think that they might have some problem with the permit down the line but be okay with the lease sale today. So I don't like the phrase done deal but yeah, it's a done deal.
Juravich: Um, so how does this fit into the overall agenda? Are we talking, is this a Trump administration thing where they want to have fracking wherever they, the shale is ripe, I guess. Is that the right word?
Zuckerman: I'd say well, it's where the shale is and we are sitting on the Utica and Marcellus shale fields in Ohio and in this region I'd see this isn't just a Trump thing I mean this the the plan to frack the Wayne goes back to 2016 So this was like an Obama plan an Obama agenda plan a Trump plan a Biden plan and now a Trump Plan again So it's not just the Trump administration that has had their interest here, but it's definitely the Trump administrations you know carrying the ball across the finish line here and
Juravich: Will this be similar to the way they're fracking under Salt Fork State Park, like where all the apparatus and equipment is outside of the park and just the lines go under it?
Zuckerman: So it's a good question. I don't know where they're planning on siting the well pads. I'd say there are sort of different goals here. Like with something like a state park, it's totally a conservation and recreation gambit. But with a national forest, there's always inherently a resource extraction component. Like there's a always logging in national forest. There's always coal mining, stuff like that. Except like there have been, I hate to get too technical here, but there's been conventional drilling. At the park, so think there will be blood style oil well like the whole 20th century. They're much shallower wells. They only go vertical. That has existed in the park for about 25 years now, 30 years now. But what we're talking about is going thousands of feet deeper and then miles laterally underground, a much more industrial activity. There's a lot more, I think the most noticeable thing if you're there is the truck traffic. It takes millions of gallons to frack a well, millions of of gallons of water. So you gotta bust that in. You gotta bust it out. So I don't know what the specific plans are here, but yeah I do I suspect it's going to look similar and at least some different ways these are in remote Parts of the floor, you know, I wouldn't expect this right off the hiking trail
Juravich: Right. And with it being a national forest, will Ohio make money off of this or who gets the profits?
Zuckerman: No, no, it's the federal government's land. But what I think, I think like there's a big picture that's worth keeping track of, which is that the Trump administration is opening up more public lands for drilling. It is easing the rules. It is reducing some of the bond requirements to do this drilling. So Ohio and the federal governor are kind of moving in tandem of saying that we have these public lands. They are for fair use by the oil and gas industry.
Juravich: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. The state opened up more than 20,000 acres of state park and wildlife area since 2024. So the state's making money off that though, right? Yeah.
Zuckerman: Right. Yeah. I mean, I think there's there's just like a clear policy understanding between these two governments and
Juravich: Do you know much about like the leaseholders who already are doing the fracking around the Salt Fork State Park area, or is it something that you've looked into?
Zuckerman: So it's Infinity Natural Resources. They are a West Virginia company. They started drilling in, I think, November. But they've started bringing in, I refer you to a story I wrote a few weeks ago, I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it's in the market of a million dollars a month that the state is getting in terms of revenue. So the state gets about 20% of the gross production of anything that comes up out of the ground, and that's on top of. Somewhere in the market of 250 million dollars signed as a signing bonus so there's there's a lot of money changing hands here I mean these are big plays and I think we're late I think some of the gas has like if you look at a map of where are all the wells and where all the laterals in Ohio it's pretty remarkable to see just how many wells there like you look in southeast Ohio eastern Ohio They're just like an, it looks like a crazy person, you know, drawing strings between newspaper articles with red string. I mean, there's so many wells down there, but these state parks, these preserves are just these, they're what they sound like, they're preserved areas. So I think that these are some of the easiest to reach gaps. It's a political problem, not an engineering one that's stopping them.
Juravich: Joe Ingalls, Ohio Public Radio, State House News Bureau. Do you have anything to add? I mean, I know Jake has covered this inside and out. I'm not sure how much fracking coverage you've done.
Ingles: You've done. I have done virtually none. Sarah Donaldson in our bureau has been more on the fracking front of things but yeah but this is always something that seems to attract a lot of opposition. Anytime you talk fracking there's gonna be people who are upset about it and you know and it seems like usually the people who want to frack eventually get what they want they just have to jump through more hoops sometimes to get it, and it kind of looks like this case.
Juravich: Jake, do you expect the group called, is it called Save Our Parks, right? Save Ohio Parks. Save Ohio parks. Will they be at the public comment meetings and such before August 17th?
Zuckerman: I think they will be there. I mean, two basic things are true of, I don't think there's ever been polling on this. So I couldn't speak to widespread polling, but if you ever make like a public comment box about fracking on public lands, it's gonna be 99% against and 1% for, and usually the 1% is the industry or the state or the occasional person who says, yeah, you know, drill baby drill, something like that. I forgot item two. Go ahead.
Juravich: That's OK. Yeah. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. This is our weekly reporter roundtable. We are talking with Jake Zuckerman from Signal Ohio, also Joe Ingalls from the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau and welcoming Laura Hancock from Cleveland.com. Welcome, Laura.
Laura Hancock: Good morning.
Juravich: Okay, we're going to move on to data centers. Speaking of things that people are opposing, I don't know if it's 99% to 1%. Maybe it might be a little more nuanced than that. But as the number of people opposing data centers continues to grow, along with the number of municipalities passing moratoriums, state leaders are searching for solutions. This morning, Dr. Amy Acton, Democratic candidate for governor. Announced support for a conditional moratorium on data centers. This statement just came out. I know we haven't had time to talk with Dr. Acton, but can anyone, does anyone have it in front of them? Can you read off? Yeah, so I got it in front. Yeah, what does conditional support mean?
Ingles: Mean. Okay it says, I'm reading this from the press release folks, so it says today Ohio gubernatorial candidate Dr. Amy Acton issued a statement announcing support for a conditional moratorium on data centers if requirements on costs, union labor, transparency, environmental standards, community benefits agreements and development are not met. Now, I don't know what all those things mean, and I'm hoping to find that out today. So if you listen to public radio, I will have an update at some point on this. But yeah, there's a lot of ifs there.
Juravich: Yeah. So basically, Laura, it sounds like Dr. Acton is saying a moratorium on data centers unless the data center meets all that list of things that Joe just read.
Hancock: But she doesn't get into details, right? We don't know, does it have to be 50% labor unions? Does it have be, I would imagine that there's no non-disclosure agreements. That's what some of the transparency stuff is. What are the environmental standards? Are we talking about noise pollution? Are we talkin' about dust from construction? What are we talkin about? Or local. Yeah. And then what the heck is a community benefit agreement? And so yeah, so we don't have a lot of details. I'll She is tapping into this bipartisan frustration over these data centers springing up from cornfields seemingly overnight.
Juravich: Okay. Does this square it all with Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy? Does he have a position on data centers? Do you know off the top of your head?
Hancock: He hasn't really staked one. I think he, a few years ago, was an investor in data center construction and data center development. But no, he hasn't. He has not. He got endorsed recently by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. And the Chamber of commerce is very go, go, go about these data centers.
Zuckerman: I'd be pontificating on air, so this is dangerous business a bit, but this strikes me as most aligned with House Speaker Matt Huffman's plan, which is unusual. Amy Acton's. Amy Actons. So this Democrat Amy Acten and Republican House Speaker, Matt Hufman, but that's the gist of the proposal the House passed is we welcome data centers here in Ohio If you meet these air water Electric grid cost containment standards then come on and do business. No NDAs So this is actually pretty and that was a bipartisan, but that wasn't just a Republican plan and that did not become law So it's more of just an idea that's been kicked around but kicked around pretty seriously But it's kind of an interesting political alignment
Juravich: Governor DeWine has been a big supporter of data centers as economic engines. He would say that he builds them here because they bring all those construction jobs, they benefit Ohio's economy. But he recently signed on to what is called President Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Joe, do you know about this pledge that Governor De Wine signed on? Too.
Ingles: Yeah, vaguely. That's the answer. But basically, the pledge is to try to make it so that these data centers kind of provide for their own utilities and don't suck out the water and electric off the grid for customers, other customers. So that's where that's headed. And Governor DeWine has. Kind of said, yeah, you know, they need to, they cannot go and raise the rates of other rate payers because they're using so much and there's just not enough.
Juravich: And Laura, do you know if the noise about data centers just grew too loud, the governor couldn't ignore it? Is that by signing this pledge, is that what he's doing? Like saying, I'm not ignoring it?
Hancock: I think so, and also probably just trying to keep Trump happy with Ohio. You know, he wants to see loyalty.
Juravich: Well, Jake, earlier, DeWine paused a controversial sales tax exemption. I'm not sure if the pause is still paused, but it's also a sales tax exemption that the legislature tried to eliminate and he vetoed that. So it's a little confusing here about where the governor stands on this.
Zuckerman: Can I add on the last point, I believe that utility companies have signed that rate payer protection pledge too, which made me really not take it very seriously. It's utility companies that go to the PUCO and ask to raise rates, so it's like a cigarette company taking a pledge to stand against lung cancer.
Ingles: Karen Kassler is listening and she has sent me a little text here and it says, Vivek Ramaswamy is very supportive of data centers, so for what it's worth, thanks Karen.
Juravich: Thank you, Karen. That's the voice in all of our ears, Karen Kassler. Okay, so but back to DeWine and his sales tax exemption. So the legislature tried to eliminate the sales tax exemption for the materials required to build these data centers. DeWin vetoed it. And then you, Jake, did a story pointing out that it cost the state a whole lot more money than originally thought. And so then DeWyne paused the sales tax exception. Do Do you know where we're at with the pause?
Zuckerman: So as far as, I mean, the pause is at the governor's whim, really, but I did, there is a meeting of the tax credit authority today and there is no data center sales tax exemption on there up for a vote, so presumably, there has been no such tax exemption awarded since he initiated the pause, so.
Juravich: So the ones that were in the works, he allowed to go through and then he said, it's paused, but there weren't any in the work anyway, right?
Zuckerman: Yes, but I think the operating point here is that this can come up as soon as Governor DeWine wakes up one day and says, I think today's a fine day to end the pause. And also he's in office until January.
Hancock: Mm-hmm.
Zuckerman: So we haven't really settled this so much as just kick the can down the road.
Juravich: Laura, you wrote an interesting piece about how populism is forcing GOP leadership to shift from unilateral control to voter-focused issues, and data centers is an example of that, basically. There's been shifting opinions from both political parties about data centers, so how is that trend playing out here when it comes to this issue?
Hancock: When you look at issues like data centers, like critiques of voucher schools, spending on voucher school scholarships for private schools, there are several issues that the legislature has looked at. Even when they discussed the Medicaid-supposed fraud that's going on that the right-wing reporter said he dug up. People would come in and say, I don't want, in the name of fraud, certain cuts, I need to continue to get paid to take care of my disabled loved one because if not, I will have to go to work and then they're going to have to be institutionalized. And you saw the legislature actually listening to these people. Some of these things have not passed, but you heard, okay, they convened a study committee. Now I talked to Danny Isaacson. He's the minority leader in the Ohio house. And he was like, a study committee means nothing. A study committee is a way you can shelve something.
Juravich: DeWine loves a good blue ribbon commission. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Hancock: So yeah, so they're like having, but you know, with the disabled families, they seem to be, you know amenable to that and they seem to be touched if you watch them. And you're seeing more and more Republicans question, hey, why are we spending over a billion dollars a year in private school vouchers? And you are seeing this year there are three, I think three, three on the Republican side Republican sponsored bills that would curb vouchers in the state. Hmm. So.
Juravich: Jake just back to the data centers for a moment. I mean, basically we were seeing from state lawmakers that they wanted to get rid of the sales tax exemption and then you found do you remember the number off the top of your head about How much tax money it costs the state by letting them have the sales tech exemption?
Zuckerman: So last year it was $1.6 billion to the state in lost revenue it otherwise would have received. And then another about $400 million in local sales taxes. So about $2 billion last year compared to, I think it was projected to cost $130 million. So we're in the 10 times off or 20 times off.
Juravich: So the projections were 10 times off, so DeWine vetoed this and let the sales tax exemption happen, and then he comes to find out that the number was 10 times off, and so he was like, wait a second.
Zuckerman: I don't, like, what happened? Find out gives me pause because there's, I think there's a lack of clarity over what Governor, Governor DeWine's understanding of the size of this credit. I'll say that his, the way his tax department came and explained this to lawmakers, because lawmakers were cheesed because, you know, we're.
Juravich: Don't think it's a great secret. Yeah, I love that. I love this. I'm very happy you use that word. Okay
Zuckerman: You know, nobody likes the media. Everyone loves using the media as a punching bag. But lawmakers, they have these staffs. They have these researchers. They don't like learning stuff from the media, and I think that it's just like an insult to their authority when they open the holiday pages of Signal Ohio and see 1.6 billion? We were told when we made our state budget, this was gonna cost us $130 million.
Juravich: So you found out, but you're a little dubious in the fact that someone either didn't tell DeWine the right number, didn't do their homework, and or he had, like he said, the wrong number.
Zuckerman: Well, the explanation from the governor's office is the way this all works is the data centers actually make their purchases and the by the way The data centers are covered by the sales tax exemption So are the gas plants that they get data centers used to power their operations. They're private for their own personal use Power like huge natural gas-fired power plants on site powering Facebook's Google etc their operations those are also tax exempt. So you take all those construction costs, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and go to the tax department and show them your receipts and then you are alleviated of that tax liability. So they're saying we can't accurately project these costs and in their defense, this is true, this is accelerating total novel space, like there's no playbook for how fast will an AI economy grow. But they're also saying we... We don't know how much we're losing until we look at all these receipts and say, well shucks, that's a lot of money.
Juravich: Well shucks, that's a lot of money. I would, yes. All right, well, we're gonna end it there. Well shuck, that a lot money. This is the Reporter Roundtable on 89.7 NPR News. And coming up we're going to talk about property taxes, where legislative efforts on reform stand and what the candidates for governor are proposing. That is when All Sides continues on 89 7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides Weekly Reporter Roundtable, an hour where we talk all things Ohio politics. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Still with us, we have Laura Hancock, politics and policy reporter for Cleveland.com, Jake Zuckerman, reporter for Signal Ohio, and Joe Ingalls, senior reporter for the Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau. Ohioans remain unhappy about their property taxes, and that's a message state lawmakers have gotten loud and clear. Joe, there are a number of proposals out there. You've written an update to kind of like catch us all up, but you liken changing property taxes to playing a complicated game of Jenga.
Ingles: How so? Well, you know how when you play Jenga, you move something and it might make something else collapse? That's kind of the way property taxes are. Because when you go in one place and make a change in law that gives a tax break to some people in one area, then another area might be affected by it. And that's what lawmakers are starting to find out. As they go and consider all these property tax ideas, because they'd have more than 50. That they have proposed that are in bill form, and they've put relatively few through at this point. And the ones that they've put through are tinkering, people would say are kind of tinkered with the property tax formula, but not making great big changes, because big changes can be expensive. But there's a lot of Ohioans who are completely cheesed, to borrow the word. Our new favorite word. Yes, I love that word. They're not happy with all these property taxes that they're paying. People say they're priced out of their homes and they're looking for lawmakers to do more.
Juravich: So one bill that passed provides some temporary tax relief, including a one-time credit on homestead exemptions. We have some audio from your story, Joe. First, this is Republican Representative Brian Stewart. Here's what he had to say.
Brian Stewart: Each Homestead recipient will receive somewhere in the neighborhood between $450 and $475 as a reduction on their January tax bill coming up at the end of this year.
Juravich: And here's Democratic Representative Bride Rose Sweeney. She had this to say.
Bride Rose Sweeney: It is still better than nothing. And for those people who will receive it, this is going to be incredibly helpful. But next year, because this money is one time, they will still be in the same position.
Juravich: Okay, so Joe, first of all, I guess you're gonna have to tell me what a homestead exemption is and then tell me what it means to get a credit on your homested exemption.
Ingles: A homestead exemption is something that is on the state tax rolls and basically it says that if you are an older Ohioan, a senior citizen, and if you qualify in a certain income level that you can take this exemption. It reduces your property taxes. It doesn't completely eliminate them. But there have been efforts to Expand that to more and more Ohioans by raising the income limit on that and or There have been ideas about making it apply to people who are disabled or have some sort of extenuating circumstance They there have been efforts to do that, but At the end of the day it has been hard to get those through and a lot of that has to do with Who should get the tax break and how it should happen? There's a lot of disagreement in the General Assembly as to how that should happen.
Juravich: This one-time credit that they were talking about, Representative Stewart said it's about $450, $475. So is it just a little extra on the homestead exemption if they already have it?
Ingles: Right, right, it's expanding it just a little bit more and they can get more money out of it.
Juravich: And Brad Rossini is saying it's helpful now, but it's a one-time thing. So that's what she wishes it was permanent or more.
Ingles: Yeah, I think that, you know, mostly the Democrats have talked about this idea of expanding the homestead exemption and what they want to do is make it available to more people and make it so it's easier for low income, especially older Ohioans to be able to stay in their home because we're hearing a lot of stories from Ohioans who cannot afford their property taxes and they're actually selling their houses and getting out from underneath it because of property tax.
Juravich: And there has been some studies done trying to figure out what can replace property taxes. Is there anything to replace it?
Ingles: Well, there is. I mean, there have been studies by experts in economics. And you can replace it with income taxes. But as we've seen in Ohio, the move has been to decrease income taxes, and since 2004, lawmakers have been decreasing income taxes and the Republican candidate for governor is talking about eliminating them. So that's the direction they're going on income tax. So that leaves maybe like the sales tax. But if they go to the sales tax, some of the estimates show as much as 20% in sales taxes. Can you imagine that would be a huge tax increase? So, you know, depending on how that would be applied, they could broaden it out to more things. You could pay tax on things you don't now pay tax on, which would take that down too, but. It's just, you know, there's a lot of moving parts in it. And that's the reason I said it's kind of like a Jenga game because you just, it really takes a lot to go into this. It's very complicated. And when you reduce the taxes for one person or one thing, then you've got to somehow compensate for that somewhere else. And that causing the problems. Yeah.
Juravich: Laura, your writing focuses a lot on education. The property tax issue hits close to home for schools. I mean, how worried are they? Because everyone has soured on property taxes and the schools get lumped into here. You know, like they're sour on all, they're cheesed on all property taxes. So what are schools feeling? Because they're getting swept up in that.
Hancock: Yeah, I mean you have over 20 billion with a B a year of property taxes collected throughout the state and two thirds of that money goes to public schools. And when taxes get, like when the legislature tries to like do it across the board, reduction of taxes like they recently did where they reduced in December, Governor DeWine signed a bill where they reduced it by three billion over the next three years. That just means they're going to go back to the ballot and ask for levies and operating levies and construction bonds and things like that. Also, you're seeing increasingly more school districts ask for income taxes. Right now, school districts that do income taxes tend to be located in farm areas. Where somebody might make 50,000 a year, but they look land rich, and so it's just not fair to make them do property taxes, so that's why it's considered more fair to do an income tax in those kinds of areas. Now you're seeing income taxes in the suburbs. I mean, Westerville now has an income tax for their school district. So it kind of doesn't have to be this way. You have to understand a little bit about history in Ohio. In 1991, out of the two thirds of the 20-some billion that go to school districts. 47.5% was paid by agriculture and homeowners. And the rest was paid for by business, like commercial. And nowadays it is 67.9%. So the legislature, Republican governed for decades with a few exceptions for Democrats, but mostly Republican, they believe that offering benefits to business owners will bring prosperity and you can argue whether that's worked or not but that's kind of part of the reason why we're in the situation.
Juravich: So tax exemptions for businesses to move to Ohio that you don't have to pay these taxes. They signed 15, 20, even more year deals to not pay the taxes.
Hancock: Or just kind of relieving certain, getting rid of, was it the tangible personal property tax and now it's this, yeah, and it's now the commercial activity tax. Anyway, they've switched the way that they've collected property taxes on business inventories and things like that, and they've overall reduced it.
Juravich: Jake, I mean, we just, you know, we heard just this morning, Amy Acton coming out with a statement on data centers. They've had to talk about taxes since both of their campaigns launched. So when it comes to tax plans, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican hopeful, has laid out a little more of a plan than his Democratic counterpart, Amy Acton and until recently Acton hadn't provided much in the way of concrete details. This is what Acton said a few months ago at an AFL-CIO of AF- AFL CIO event. This is from a story by Jo's colleague Karen Kasler.
Dr. Amy Acton: We are giving tax breaks to the wealthiest people at the expense of everyone else. I believe it is time that we create budgets and use every lever of the governorship to give breaks to the rest of us.
Juravich: So Joe or Jake, I don't know who's following tax plans more closely. Acton has put out a more detailed plan since those statements, includes child tax credits, et cetera.
Ingles: Yes, it does. It includes child tax. Here's the thing. It has the household income. We were talking about the Homestead tax exemption. It would go to older disabled adults and it would go up to $55,000. It's now $50,000, the current income limit is $41,000 so it expand to 55,000 and then she'd also create it's something like a circuit breaker, but they're not calling it a circuit breaker, which means that if your taxes are a certain percent of your income, then anything above that, you don't have to pay. That's the circuit breaker? That's a circuit. It trips the circuit break. Right, and they don't call it a circuit breaker but basically, if your tax bill is more than 4%, if it rises more than four percent a year, if there's some percentage, a whole formula into that, then you would not have to pay.
Hancock: And I think the income is up to $134,000.
Ingles: 132, I think it is, yeah.
Hancock: Okay, so yeah, so we're talking more middle class.
Juravich: Okay. And now how does this compare with Ramaswami's plan, which we've heard about involves slowly over time, completely eliminating the income tax and, but also more immediately he wants to eliminate the capital gains tax. Um, is that, do I, am I missing anything?
Zuckerman: Well, this isn't really my wheelhouse. I've found that Vivek Ramaswamy has kind of said things and then unsaid things and then said new things. So I don't actually feel like I have a good hold on what his ideas are. But I think, I mean, something I think to use the Jenga metaphor of, you know, you're trying to pull out these little blocks and you're tying to knock over the whole tower. I think it's interesting that the people who want to abolish property taxes right now in Ohio and have gathered a couple hundred thousand signatures to do so. Their idea- is to take a big truck and knock over the entire Jenga Tower and then rebuild it from the ground up, which is not really what I'm hearing, I guess like maybe more so from Vivek, but he's just sort of saying eliminate them and promising business growth will sort of recoup those losses and don't get caught up in the numbers. What Amy Acton is talking about here is, at least to me, maybe I'm not fully understanding it, but more marginal and around the edge. It's not a destruction of the current system and a rebuild. It's. It's things like what Joe described of just sort of making sure that there's no great shock to the system of one taxpayer.
Ingles: Vivek Ramaswamy basically has talked for months about rolling back the property taxes to pre-pandemic levels. You remember the pandemic, that's really when property values spiked considerably. So he's talking about rolling them back. He has talked about eliminating income tax, eliminating capital gains tax, and of course someone's got to pay tax somewhere. So you know when you talk about this whole tax thing, you've got to think about How do you get to the level you have? Are you gonna fee someone? There's been talks about fees, new fees on everything.
Hancock: Go somehow. Also, you have to look at how government's going to get cut. There is no way you can eliminate complete revenue streams in the state without cutting government significantly. And if you cut property taxes, there goes education.
Ingles: And if you cut property taxes, there goes, you know, like your police, it might be your fire protection. It might be EMS. Let's not forget some MRDD kind of activities groups. And then also libraries, public libraries depend on these taxes. So there's a lot of things that are popular with voters that voters like that would be hurt if you completely eliminate property tax. So basically, you're making. Small moves over time and trying to figure out what you can do to help certain groups. But they're not even on the same page about which groups they wanna help.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News and our Weekly Reporter Roundtable. We're talking with Joe Ingalls from the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau, Jake Zuckerman from Signal Ohio, and Laura Hancock from Cleveland.com. Before we take the break, Laura, I wanted to talk about a story that you wrote yesterday. We're three weeks away from the start of the school year, depending on your district. So we'll turn, we have a few education related topics. We'll do one before the break. You wrote a story on a study that shows that Ohio teachers unions are losing some of their strength. Can you tell me about that study and what it could mean for the governor's race?
Hancock: The study was done by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and they looked at all 50 states in Washington, D.C., and they look at like dozens of metrics. Teacher unions perceived political power based on surveys. Teacher union salaries is a percentage of education spending, or teacher salaries. Percentage of the state's budget that's spent on K-12. Strength of school choice laws, which teachers unions are generally against, they looked at all this stuff. And they found that Ohio fell from, in 2012, they were the 12th strongest, the teachers unions here were 12th strongest in the country and they're now 17th. So they have fallen a lot. An area that they are still strong in is Ohio's fifth strongest in the collective bargaining laws. So then you go look ahead and, you know, what would Vive Gramaswamy or Dr. Amy Acton do if they became governor? Vivek Ramaswamy, some of this, he won't talk really, but he has said he doesn't mind eliminating teachers unions and he is talking. He doesn't. He wouldn't. And so, and he, some the stuff that he wants to do would like, for instance, summer school, like a more year round school schedule, things like that, merit pay, that there's not really a lot of that in current bargaining, current contracts and so you have to break contracts or maybe even breaking unions to do this. He's not answering what he plans to do to make education better with these plans. Dr. Acton is very much on the side of, I mean, she got the endorsement from the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Education Association, the two teachers unions in the state. And she wants more funding for public education. So she hasn't said really where it's going to come from or anything. But, you know, she, she definitely is more the pro labor union side. I don't know what you'll expect from Vivek Gramaswamy. Teachers unions are trying to get Dr. Acting elected. But they're also kind of expecting that they're gonna have to continue to fight if Vivek Ramaswamy wins.
Ingles: You know the teachers unions have always kind of traditionally been on the Democratic side of things And if you look at actual teachers think about you know just everyone think about the teachers You know in your life the school employees you know in life who their union heads are saying okay We'd like this person in their policies, but a lot of times the the rank-and-file Isn't necessarily following that it's kind of weakened it
Hancock: An interesting thing about Ohio's teachers unions though, I didn't go into this in the story because my story was already really long, but the rate at which Ohio teacher unions endorse Democrats and give them, write them checks for their reelection campaigns is twice the national average.
Juravich: Well, that is interesting. I don't know what that means, but it's interesting. So I'm just going to tie together our taxes conversation and this education topic by saying that you can mark your calendars. Ohio has a sales tax holiday before the start of the school year, right? But they've shortened it. It's Friday, August 7th through Sunday, August 9th. So they've done an expanded holiday in the past, but just the three this time. Does this Does this provide an economic boost to people like this, this little sales tax holiday?
Zuckerman: I can say the legislature has studied this from time because this is sort of like the easiest tax refund method. We have extra money. Let's just extend the sales tax holiday. There's not any evidence that commercial activity increases with these, which if you extrapolate that a little bit and, you know, allow me some liberties here, I don't think people know this is happening. How connected are people with the machinations of the General Assembly that they know, you know...
Juravich: If you were gonna go shopping on August 7th, you're gonna go and you're going to buy what you were going to buy and it doesn't matter whether you're paying a sales tax or not.
Zuckerman: Yeah, and to the legislature's credit, there's a ton of back-to-school shopping that happens in that time. So it's a good time to put it, but I'm just not sure where people are that this is happening until they look at the receipt and say, huh, nice, I saved six dollars.
Ingles: Yeah, and I'm not sure that the deals are there on those days either, because I've looked, I remember last year I was looking for some organizational stuff for my house and, you know, the deals were not there on the days that they had the tax-free policies, but then, you know, day after, man, it's like 30% off, so it's, like, what happened there? You know, I just wonder if maybe
Juravich: Yeah, all the clothes are full price, but you don't have to pay sales tax. But if you wait a week, then the clothes will be on sale.
Ingles: Yeah, all right. That's the way it was in my experience.
Juravich: I don't know, that's not scientific, not scientific. Not scientific. Well, coming up, why aren't Ohioans enticed by the mega million jackpot, plus Ohio still has a lot of cases of that stomach parasite causing some discomfort? That is when the Reporter Roundtable from all sides continues on 89.7 NPR News. You're listening to All Sides in the Weekly Reporter Roundtable. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. And with us in the studio to talk all things politics, we have Jake Zuckerman, reporter for Signal Ohio, Joe Engels, senior reporter for the Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau, and Laura Hancock, politics and policy reporter for Cleveland.com. Who would turn away from a chance to win $800 million in the form of a jackpot? Well, turns out a sizable number of Ohioans. Ohio's lottery director, Danielle Frizzi-Babb, sums it up this way.
Danielle Frizzi-Babb: The levels that you would think would drive traffic don't really anymore. Players have what we like to call jackpot fatigue.
Juravich: So what's happening here, Ohioans are not, I thought Ohioans loved the lottery or Ohioans not buying as many lotteries as it is. Yeah.
Ingles: Well, Frizzy Babs says what's happening is that the jackpots are going higher and we see these billion dollar plus jackpats So now she's saying that people when they see a hundred million dollars are like Yeah, I'll sit on the sidelines till it hits over a billion. And so there's some fatigue there. She says Too many big jackpot. Yeah over the size of the jackpot. But another thing you have to look at here is, for example, Mega Millions is big right now. I think it's over 800 million or around that point, somewhere around that right now, but the thing is, Mega millions in 2005, a ticket went from $2 up to $5. So, you're talking about, you know, people spending more money for tickets. So, maybe they're sitting on the sideline and saying, well, you now, I'm gonna lose money probably. On this ticket, but if I'm gonna lose money, at least I want the jackpot to be huge. But to me, 800 million's a huge amount too, so I don't know.
Juravich: And Laura, I don't know if you know off the top of your head, but the Ohio Lottery benefits education, right? So...
Hancock: I learned from Joe. It's over like 1.4 billion a year. That's quite a bit. I that was more than I thought so yeah That's a bit of money. I mean when you
Juravich: So education needs people to buy lottery tickets, I guess, right?
Ingles: Yeah, but that was 1.5 billion that transfer from the lottery was 1 point 5 billion in 2024 before mega millions raised its rate to five dollars. Mm-hmm. So 2004 or the last one was which would have been 2005 was 1 0.4 billion So Jake anything to add about the lottery?
Zuckerman: No, this is the first I'm hearing this news. Honestly, my gut reaction is, are people just getting their gambling fit? Like, you know, I bet on the Super Bowl and what the weather's gonna be and what Trump's gonna say. What do I need the lottery for?
Juravich: I can't think of the name of the other one, Kalshi and the other one. Polymarket, yeah.
Ingles: Bet on anything now. You can bet on the weather, you can bet on politics, you bet on whatever. I mean, all kinds of weird.
Zuckerman: Lottery? That's passe. That's old hat.
Juravich: Yeah, so who needs Mega Millions and scratch-off tickets whenever you can bet on, you know, the exact time someone's going to hold a note in the National Anthem, right? Exactly. Yeah. This is the Reporter Roundtable, and we're talking this week with Joe Ingalls from the Ohio Public Radio State House News Bureau, Jake Zuckerman from Signal Ohio, and Laura Hancock from Cleveland.com. I am going to jump to discussing the parasite causing intestinal distress. Does anyone want to say explosive diarrhea? Because that seems to be the media's... That seems to be the media's new favorite phrase this week. But Ohio has among the highest cases of this parasite and the cases are increasing. Jo, do you have the latest on that?
Ingles: Well, I think Michigan still has the highest rate. I think they still have some on us, but we have seen this rate in the recent weeks more than double. I mean, we're completely up. It was like 364 cases a couple weeks ago, and then it went up to 1274. Now it's up more. It would kind of double from that. We're seeing a lot of this. It's coming from, well, That's part of the problem. We don't know exactly where it's coming from, but it seems like it is tracing back to the leafy greens, to some of the things that people buy that they eat, and it not necessarily, you can't necessarily wash your vegetables really good and get this off of it. So because they don't now, and there's been a lot of... There's been false positive tests, there's been a lot of people reacting like Taco Bell took lettuce off its thing just to be sure that they weren't spreading it. But since we don't know exactly where it's coming from, people are being very reactive and not buying things like lettuces, berries, things like that that you would eat without having a tough rind on them.
Juravich: Yeah, I mean, Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, the director of the Ohio Department of Health, advises Ohioans to wash their produce, their fruits and vegetables very well. Or cook them. Or cook them. But it's but it's not necessarily going to help. If you wash it or even if it says pre-washed, it doesn't necessarily mean it's parasite free, right?
Ingles: Yeah, it could take the virus, the level down, so you won't get as sick, because you won't have as much on it. But it still is something that it could be in there. So a lot of people are using this as an excuse to shy away. Naughty healthy. Yes, yeah, you know, shy away, get the chocolate bars or something. I've been kind of...
Hancock: I was really paranoid. I was on vacation a couple weeks ago, and I was reading a ton about it. It just depends on which vegetables. It's hard, for instance, to get it out of a raspberry because of all the little crevices, to wash it. But I washed a watermelon with Don Dish soap, and it felt okay. I haven't gotten sick so far.
Ingles: Yeah, those are the little those are a little safer because they have you know the rind vegetables You know if you wash them really good scrub them on the outside and don't just soap using that and getting it off there Then when you cut through it if there was something on the inside it doesn't go into the fruit part of it so
Juravich: And now we, but now we have the memes left and right where it was like, well, Doritos never made me sick, right? And so why should I bother eating salad?
Ingles: Cardiologists would definitely say Doritos make you sick.
Juravich: Um, I mean, uh, Jake, I don't know if you've been following this at all, but there, there are reports that cuts to federal agencies could become a part of the story. Um, you know, the FDA has a smaller staff. The CDC has a small staff. Um. Have you read anything about that?
Zuckerman: No, it's something I've wondered, but I couldn't really add anything for you.
Juravich: Okay, yeah, do you have anything to add? No, I don't know either. Yes. So, okay, we're gonna keep an eye on this But Ohio has the second number of cases still eat your fruits and veggies, but just wash them. Is that that's the work
Ingles: Or cook them. If you're cooking them, that also gets out a lot of bacteria and a lot of things.
Juravich: All right, well before we run out of time, something I teased much earlier on in the show that I wanted to talk about is Ohio agencies using flock AI cameras, which a number of Ohio cities are turning away from. So Jake, state agencies are using this technology too, and it's becoming more and more controversial. There's privacy concerns. Can you talk to me about some of the latest news with flock cameras?
Zuckerman: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that a lot of cities are reconsidering their flock contracts, Dayton's getting out of them, Cleveland almost got out of it, Columbus says it wants to crack down on its flock contract, and these are super powered cameras. They can track the make, model, bumper stickers, license plate, dents, etc. On a car and map its movements around a city over time so you can get people's associations, their whereabouts, who they're meeting with, etc. And I was just curious, where's the state in all this? And I went through some public records and found that probably the most notable to me was that the Bureau of Workers' Compensation, which is the insurance program that Ohio runs for people get hurt at work, they are using this technology. They say it's to root out fraud. They didn't specify, but if you read between the lines, that presumably means if you come to BWC and say, I injured my back at work and I can't move. And they see you going to the gym and going to golf course, well, seems like your back is fine. You know, the fire marshal which investigates suspicious fires, they are using this technology. Both ODRC and DYS, those are the two state agencies that run prisons in Ohio. They are flock subscribers now. The attorney general's office, the Department of Public Safety. So it was interesting to me that. Some cities are saying, I'm not so sure about this flock stuff. And meanwhile, the state, more and more agencies are putting more and money toward this technology.
Juravich: It's not that the state owns the cameras. It states buying access to cameras that the cities have or that Flock has put up in certain places. Is that what, or like who owns the camera?
Zuckerman: State agencies have been very difficult to get information out of on this point. I know that at least the Department of Commerce, which oversees the fire marshal, they own five cameras. Other agencies wouldn't tell us how many cameras. Flock sells both services. They sell, you know, you can access the data or you can own your own cameras. So I don't have a clean answer to your question. I know at least department of commerce is buying cameras. I have public records requests out for some of these contracts. I hope to learn more in the future.
Juravich: Because I know Columbus has said that they want to stop agencies from using their cameras. So I guess if Columbus owns the camera or pays for the majority of the camera, maybe the state can't or someone another agency can't access it. I'm not sure.
Zuckerman: So if you ask Flock, Flock will tell you that the owner of the cameras owns the data and has total control over who can access it. What seems to be happening in practice is like Columbus is a city that made such a promise and federal immigration officials who have this huge interest in tracking people to very specific locations, you know, this part of a mass deportation campaign, they accessed Columbus's data 15,000 times. The same thing happened in Dayton. It was fewer, but thousands of times over. So... It's unclear if people are getting into these without some kind of permission from the cities or if the cities are letting other agencies in and not being candid about it. In Dayton's case, they said there was just a clerical error essentially in setting up the database and who had permissions to it. So I think there are two big criticisms here. One is just this general, you don't have warrants for this kind of surveillance and people have a right to privacy. And then number two, much more specific to the moment, is that ICE is using this to deport people. Why are cities holding the door open to this?
Juravich: We're going to leave it there because we're out of time, but I want to say thank you to Jake Zuckerman, reporter for Signal Ohio. Thank you for your time today. You're welcome. Jo Ingles, senior reporter for the Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau. Thanks Jo.
Ingles: Great to be here.
Juravich: And Laura Hancock, politics and policy reporter for Cleveland.com. Thanks Laura. Thank you. And you've been listening to all sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich. Thanks for joining us.